Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Meta description is a factor not related to search engines, but for people it is a big indicator of information judgment.

For example, when you search by keyword “bicycle site”, the following two types of search results will come up.

Search results for bicycle site

Can you see the definitive difference?

In the first example, the meta description is interrupted halfway. This is extremely undesirable. Because I can not explain exactly what this page is about.

On the other hand, in the second example, “meta description” is properly written. This is a meta description that explains the contents of the page briefly, which the reader is willing to read.

This difference is that we unconsciously tell you if you are willing to read the page.

Optimized meta description indirectly involves SEO

I mentioned earlier that the search engine did not refer to meta description. However, it affects indirectly.

I think that the relevance between the meta description and the search result ranking is the following four points.

The content of meta description itself does not have any effect on SEO.

User actions affect search algorithms

In particular CTR Will affect the search algorithm, in particular.

The meta description is the most important (contributing to CTR) metric that you can decide on the search results page if the user actually clicks the link.

Although it is an old article, Dr. Peter J. Meyersof MOZ of SEO company says about CTR as follows.

The first metric I think Google makes broad use of is direct Click-Through Rate (CTR) from the SERPs themselves. Whether or not a result gets clicked on is one of Google’s and Bing’s first clues about whether any given result is a good match to a query. We know Google and Bing both have this data, because they directly report it to us.